I think I’ve confused you.  May I have a few moments to clear things up?

You know that Cheryl and I do something related to helping medium-sized and big companies learn how to use social media for business.  That can be a broad range of things, though, can’t it?

Conversations with Molly Brochers (one of FahlgrenMortine’s rising stars) this week led me to start rethinking my content direction.  Part of that revelation is to help you to get a clear(er) picture of what Social Business Strategies does to help companies wrap their collective head around the social web.  I want to you know what we’re building.

Whether or not you know it, you read this blog.  You’re already involved.

The Vision

“People of Earth!” (There’s that line from Cluetrain again.)  Humans inhabit the web.  Each day we get closer to living in the matrix.  We socialize with each other.  We curate and collect things.  We do business.

Social Business Strategies helps mid-sized and large organizations implement change, so that they can leverage humans and technology to do business.

What We Do at Social Business Strategies (Right Now)

To make this simple, here’s a list (and some basic descriptions of what each set of words means).  There’s a ton of “definitions” floating around the web.  Here’s my take:

• Online Presence Audits and Recommendations – We look at what’s out there on the web about your business and brand, including the properties you own, as well as the content and conversations you don’t.  We look at what your competitors are doing.  We look at the category of your products and services (as a whole) to find trends, ideas and holes to fill.  We use a variety of tools and human power to wipe the fog from your organization’s lens.  And we go deep.  Really, really deep.
• Social Business Audits – This is more geared toward the BIG companies.  Social Business Audits have three phased goals.  Firstly, we complete the presence audit you see above.  Secondly, we look comprehensively at the other technology tools your business is using to see how everything plays together.  Why?  Information silos can kill productivity – and your effectiveness – and often need fixed first.  Thirdly, we look inside your organization at the humans who work there.  We gauge how easy (or difficult) it will be for your organization to make content production and social media utilization work.  By doing this, we determine how much you can do and how much you could potentially outsource to a conversational marketing firm.  It’s usually a mix.
• Strategy – We help you build communication strategies that use social media tools.  That includes all the buzzwords: content strategy, distribution, listening, training and development, internal communications, curation, product and service development, and technology rollouts.  We’re strategists.  It’s what we do.
• Process and Policy – We look into your organization to help define how the humans who work for you need to use these tools.  We make sure that everything is in place to keep people honest, transparent, respectful, proactive and in touch with your organization’s customer experience.
• Social Media Optimization – We help you figure out how your social objects (profiles, pages, videos, images and lists) are found by people on the web.  We also help you figure out how to get the people who find those objects to take the actions you want them to take.  That’s called conversion.  We like conversion.
• Human Business Teams – These are the people who sit behind your organization’s social media tools.  They listen to and connect with customers, produce online content, funnel conversations to the right places and make things happen for your business.  We help companies identify the folks inside who have the highest potential to “do” social media for your organization.  This can be in the form of collaborative blog teams or even the customer service folks who listen for and participate in your customers’ online conversations.  Also, if your company doesn’t have the desire or ability to take this stuff in-house, we help you get set up with a dedicated, outsourced team of skilled people who can do it for you.  That’s what we’ve been incubating for the last year at Incept (client, and partner).
• Social Media Program Implementation – We guide you and your business along the way to executing all of this.  We help you make it happen.  We help you measure success and failure.  We help you keep the program going.  We provide ideas.  By doing all of this, we change organizations and how they communicate – inside and out.

We All Need Sanity

God knows we all need Sanity.  The business environment is complex, adaptive, fast-moving, super-dynamic and, at times, freaking crazy.

Our Sanity Process (TM) is a tool we’ve developed to discover what’s most important to your business, who we need to communicate with (and what’s important to them) and how we measure success as we work toward an end result.  Sanity sets the framework for a successful project.  Every time.

I don’t mean to sound conceited by saying this, but if you’re not willing to give us 10-15 hours of your team’s time during our Sanity Process - so that we can extract the information we need to help you – you’re probably not the right client for Social Business Strategies.

Sanity is that important.

Cultivating an Ecosystem

That phrase gets overused all the time.  I’m pretty sure it was Brogan who first made it popular sometime around the time of release of Trust Agents.  That said, it was my good friend, Perry Maughmer, who told me that’s essentially what I’m doing with Social Business Strategies.  At the time, I didn’t see it.  I do now.

In its simplest form, here’s my vision for what the ecosystem needs to be, in terms of social business: This ecosystem is based on knowing what it takes for an organization to “do” social media.

We have the pieces in place and I’m happy to talk to you about it one-on-one, if you like.

Social Business Ecosystem

What’s your take on social business? What about Social Business Strategies?

nateriggs

I advise mid-sized & large organizations on how to adopt and use social media to market through organizational culture and better serve their clients. I'm also a blended family dad who enjoys music, photography and distance racing. When I'm not writing here, you can find me writing over at the Content Marketing Institute. Like what you've read so far? Then why not subscribe HERE?

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